Sin (21 page)

The air echoed in the darkness -
if this was a dream, it added a touch of the macabre to my mental
invention. I had to accept, though, that this wasn't sleepytime. I
was wide awake. Night had fallen and the streets were drifting
amongst the twilight, waiting for their chance to get a little kip
themselves. I saw the odd moth battling with a street lamp – dusty
winged Don Quixotes and their windmills. I saw my breath clouding
in the light chill, hopefully not my soul escaping before the
trouble to come that Joy had promised. I hadn't checked the time,
my watch was still in the safe back at the institution, but it felt
as if it was around 8 o'clock or so. I'd slept the day away. I was
refreshed, but I wasn't sure I could afford to lose those hours.
Dr. Connors might have simply thought "Oh well, that's one less
loony to worry about," but I doubted it. Once you had handed
yourself over to him, you were his property. Until he said
otherwise.

As we walked we, naturally,
passed other pedestrians. At first I didn't notice that anything
was out of the ordinary. Or rather, I didn't notice that anything
was
not
out of the ordinary. We could have been simply a
brother and sister out walking - going to the shop or the pub or
the cinema. Ordinary. No-one would know one of us was serial killer
and the other was dead. And that was the point. How could we be
seen as a couple? Whether Joy was a spirit or just the product of
my own tortured mind, she would be invisible, wouldn't she? I'd
look like a loon, chatting to myself - or at best someone talking
through a bluetooth headset which, on closer inspection didn't
exist. But Joy wasn't there, not in corporeal, physical, real
terms.

You'd think.

So why did the guy in the torn
jeans, tinny music spilling out from his tiny earphones, make eye
contact with her? And the girl who was only just managing to keep
atop the heels she was wearing walk - after a fashion - around her?
Why were people acting as if she was there when she couldn't,
shouldn't,
wasn’t
?

Ask me another. Unlike my sister
who most probably knew the answer but wasn't allowed to say, I
really didn't have a clue.

I wanted to ask. Did she know
that? Had she read my thoughts - or even been my thoughts if she
was part of my mind - but was waiting for me to voice my question?
To admit what it must mean?

OK. So be it.

I saw dead people and, it
seemed, so the hell did everyone else. Unless I was somehow
projecting my own brand of Krayzeee onto each and every person who
happened by, Joy was a walking corpse, or ghost, or hallucination.
Take your pick. What's your fancy? Reanimated cadaver anyone? Ghost
of sister passed?

I said it.

"You're real."

"Well whup-de-do."

"I suppose I can't escape
it."

"Nope."

"So what are you then? Are you a
ghost? Or a zombie? Or one of my delusions made real?"

"Yep."

"Yes what?"

"I am a ghost, or I'm a zombie,
or I'm a little pinch of Sin's Delirium."

She could be as aggravating as
me sometimes.

"Sin's Delirium," I said.
"Sounds like something you'd put in a curry."

Joy laughed and the world
clicked back into its groove for a little while longer. At least
until I derailed it again.

The Seven Hills were surrounded
by four long roads. Littlecoates Road was home to Western School,
which was my own seat of learning as a kid, a golf course, a hotel
and a residential home for the elderly. Yarborough Road was a
sweeping curve where, at its apex, had once been a video rental
store owned by a friend of mine's family. They'd had an Alsatian
dog that had suffered from a growth hormone imbalance. By the time
it was fully grown you could have slung a saddle over its back and
ridden off into the sunset crying "Yeehaaaah." On Chelmsford Avenue
resided the water company's water tower (between the road and the
Hills) and another school. Once it, the school, had been
'affectionately' referred to as Pram Land, a reference to the
abnormally high pregnancy rate amongst its pupils. About ten years
ago it had been turned into a sixth form college, quite a
successful one by all accounts, and the prams had been traded in
for a crèche. Along the fourth side was Cambridge Road and this
held the main entrance into the Hills. For a hundred metres or so a
low metal fence, less than knee high, served as the barrier between
residential and run-amok. How anyone thought such a barrier would
hold back a pack of raving rabid rats, I didn't know, but it did.
There were never, to my knowledge, any reported cases of
individuals being mauled or eviscerated as they walked by, nor were
there tales of folk going missing in the Hills' vicinity, possibly
being dragged under the barrier and off to the rats' lair for the
main course of a Sunday roast, without it being roasted.

We were turning onto Cambridge
Road when a high pitched voice clawed my ears from somewhere off to
the side.

"Sin!"

Poo. I suppose it had to happen
sooner or later, but why couldn't it have been so much later? And
why did it have to be while I was with whatever remained of my dead
sister, who refused to not be seen?

I recognised the voice
immediately. Wendy Carpenter. Long time friend and co-conspirator
of my mother. Putting the world to rights by tearing apart the
reputations of their friends and neighbours. She had the dress
sense of a hippo, bathed probably once every full moon, and was the
proud owner of a voice that could strip wallpaper at twenty paces.
I remember wondering, when I was much younger and she'd visited mum
for one of their regular Saturday afternoon shredding sessions, if
I held an orange near her while she was ranting, would its skin
peel off by itself, helped along by her fingernails-on-blackboard
voice.

I never tried it though, fruit
being something only yearned for on a semi-permanent diet of chips
and fried anything. I use the term 'diet' very loosely.

I stopped and turned, a smile
trying desperately to not become a grimace.

"Wendy," I said. A hint of
enthusiasm struggled to make itself heard and was very nearly
successful.

"Sin! How are you! It's been so
long, I almost didn't recognise you there."

Not long enough.

"Hello Wendy. I'm doing OK. Same
old, you know."

Her breath smelled of old
onions. Her coat was the same one she'd worn so many years ago -
grassy green with a faux-fur collar and cuffs. It seemed cleaner
than I remembered. She was wearing her slippers, dark brown
moccasin style ones with worn toes. I don't think she had ever had
a normal pair of shoes on her feet. I could only ever recall
slippers or those flip flops that slap-scrape-slapped as she
walked.

"Cyril died, you know."

Cyril was her husband. I would
say long suffering, as anyone married to Wendy Carpenter must be,
but he spent so much time in the Oak Tree pub, drinking pints of
bitter with his nicotine stained fingers and his little coven of
drinking buddies, enveloped in their impenetrable cloak of
cigarette smoke, I don't think he really noticed anyway.

"That's a shame," I said.

"Yes," she said. "It was. He was
a good man."

I didn't know why she was
springing this little snippet of information on me. I hadn't seen
her in something like two decades. Saying 'Hi' then jumping in with
news of her deceased husband seemed a little random to me. Maybe it
was because I was the only person along this street whom she hadn't
told. Or because she'd spent so long in my company when I was a
child, she felt a weird motherly connection and just wanted to
share. Either way, I feigned interest, just hoping this encounter
would be over with quickly so I could escape with my equally
deceased sister to wherever she wanted to take me.

"Was he ill?" I asked. Yes, I
know. Why lead the conversation on when I wanted it over and done.
I couldn't help it. My dislike for the woman was not as strong as I
seemed to want to think. I did try to say that I wasn't all
bad.

"No," she said. "It was a quick
death. He slipped on a patch of piss in the Oak Tree toilets, and
hit his head on one of the urinals. They said he wouldn't have
known a thing."

If I'd been eating something at
that point, I think I would have choked on it. If I'd been
drinking, then there was a good chance that Wendy would have been
wearing it.

"Really?"

"Yes. The Oak Tree were
brilliant after. They didn't charge me for the broken urinal, and
they let me hold the wake there after his funeral. They even paid
for the first drink for everyone."

Such generosity, I thought. I
couldn't help but feel for this poor woman. She seemed just a step
up from pathetic. Lonely. No one to share gossip with and no one to
complain to. Still wrapped up in a life that had left her behind,
cocooned in its memory to avoid facing her empty house. She'd sit
in Cyril's favourite chair, with its worn arms and dirty patch on
the seat where he'd drop his ash from his cigarette, rubbing it in
rather than brushing it off. She'd have the television on, but not
be watching it. She'd stare out of the window but not be seeing,
her eyes as vacant as her life.

"Are you ok?" Joy asked.

Wendy jumped slightly. Her eyes
blinked and she looked at Joy as if only just seeing her.

"Sorry love," she said. "I
hardly even noticed you. I must need these glasses checking."

I felt like telling her that it
wasn't her glasses at fault, nor was it her eyes. It was her
ability to see ghosts that, perhaps, wasn't quite as good as it
might be. And no optician had a lens for that. I didn't though.

"That's OK," Joys said smiling
her smile.

You could almost have seen the
candle that had remained extinguished in the depths of Wendy's gut
for all these years suddenly ignite, a flame dancing into life and
banishing the darkness. The change to her stance and her features
was immediately obvious. She straightened, the slouch that had
dragged her forward and down - in more ways than one - vanishing.
Her eyes defogged and had the beginnings of a sparkle.

"Well," she said, her voice
having lost the quiver that hadn't been noticeable until it wasn't
there. "I have to be going. Things to do, you know."

"People to see?" asked Joy.

"Who knows," Wendy said. "I
haven't seen my grandson in months. He should know his nanna."

"That he should," I said. "How
old is he?"

"He's four. He's a bundle of
energy with a mouth to match." Wendy laughed and I ignored the way
her stale onion breath misted the air and seemed to float,
semi-solid towards me. I suppressed the urge to swat it away like
an annoying wasp.

"Sounds wonderful," said Joy. I
could almost see her voice wrapping its velvet cloak around Wendy's
shoulders.

"Yes, doesn't it," said Wendy.
Her own voice had dropped an octave and had lost its splintered
glass in your ears feel. "Take care, the pair of you."

"We will," Joy and I said.

I reached out and held her hand
and she gripped mine back. I would never have suspected that Wendy
Carpenter might have a human, or humane side, or that I would
voluntarily touch her hand. I could only ever have envisaged her
with a knife in her hand, spying out who's back she was going to
bury it in. That she might have feelings or be worthy of sympathy -
not that sympathy necessarily required someone to be 'worthy' - was
something I would have bet I'd never consider. It was a warm
moment, made all the better because it was unexpected.

"Come on," said Joy. "Let's
go."

We turned and crossed the
road.

"You did a good thing there," I
said.

"Thanks." She sounded sad or
wistful.

"See," I said, "it's not all
bad."

"No," she replied, looking at me
pointedly. "It's not."

I was sure more meaning was
hidden in that statement that I could immediately see. She was
telling me something without telling me. I wasn't going to work it
out though. It was, I thought, something that would come to me as
time went on, dragging us with it.

"You can still do it then?"

"It seems so, doesn't it?"

"It doesn't stop when you..." I
couldn't make myself say it.

"Die? Kill yourself?" I nodded.
"No. As long as you're here, it's there."

"So..." I began, but she stopped
me with a hand on my arm.

"So I didn't need to do myself
in. It didn't stop." She dropped her hand and turned away. "It's
different now. I don't feel such a need. I'm not suffocated by
their problems. And anyway, I'm not here all the time. I'm only
here now for you."

"For me?"

Joy nodded but didn't say
anything. She pointed ahead of us and I knew the subject was
closed, at least for now.

"Come on then," I said. Either
all would become clear, or it wouldn't. If the hood stayed over my
head, tied tightly at my neck, blocking everything out, then there
was nothing I could do to untie the knot or cut the cord. I'd
simply have to wait to see if Joy, or somebody else, would remove
it for me. My life, their hands. I just hoped 'They' didn't drop
it.

The low metal fence glowed in
the street light and flashed in the beam of the cars that passed.
Beyond it was a blackness that felt all consuming, as if it had
eaten the land and the air and was waiting for us to cross so it
could devour us too.

"Get a grip!" said Joy, shaking
her head. "Life is allowed to be more mellow than drama, you
know."

"Will you stop doing that! It's
rude!"

"Well, stop thinking such crap
then."

"If you stopped reading my
thoughts, you wouldn't have any crap to complain about!"

"Nernerner," she said in a whine
that a two year old would have been proud of. I didn't have an
answer to that, but at least it managed to break the beginnings of
tension. Joy's suicide might have been a complete waste, but
perhaps it wasn't. If it was better for her then did that make it
OK? Were we given these lives to do with as we wished? And if that
wish included ending them, disposing of them, was that still fine
because free will dictated it was up to us?